Susan Solomon talks with
ScienceWatch.com and answers a few questions about
this month's New Hot Paper in the field of
Geosciences. The author has also sent along images of
their work.
Article Title: Irreversible climate change due to
carbon dioxide emissions
Authors: Solomon, S;Plattner, GK;Knutti,
R;Friedlingstein, P
Journal: PROC NAT ACAD SCI USA, Volume: 106, Issue: 6, Page:
1704-1709, Year: FEB 10 2009
* Natl Ocean & Atmospher Adm, Earth Syst Res Lab, Div Chem
Sci, Boulder, CO 80305 USA.
* Natl Ocean & Atmospher Adm, Earth Syst Res Lab, Div Chem
Sci, Boulder, CO 80305 USA.
(addresses have been truncated.)
Why do you think your paper is highly
cited?
The paper addresses an issue that is of very broad interest in climate
change, and it tries to do that in an accessible way. I think that it makes
an important point and does so in a manner that is more easily understood
than previous work.
Does it describe a new discovery, methodology, or
synthesis of knowledge?
Susan Solomon does research on both ozone depletion and
climate change, and she is pictured here at the South
Pole.
The paper contains some synthesis of existing knowledge, but it also has
some new discoveries that build from the synthesis.
Would you summarize the significance of your paper
in layman's terms?
The paper showed that the climate changes that take place due to
human-caused changes in carbon dioxide should be considered irreversible
for at least a thousand years, even if we stop emitting this gas, and it
discussed some of the impacts that this will lead to—unless we
develop some kind of geoengineering to actively cool the climate, which is
not yet in hand and which we don't consider in the paper.
Key impacts include a lock-in to commitments to slow long-term sea level
rise and large reductions in dry season rainfall in several regions. Most
scientists, including myself, assumed that if we stopped emitting carbon
dioxide that the warming it produces would be gone in a few hundred years
or so, but we show that this isn't correct. So, the paper has increased the
understanding of the risks being taken as we continue to emit.
How did you become involved in this research, and
were there any problems along the way?
In working with other colleagues and reading the literature, I noticed some
studies probing certain aspects of the long lifetime of carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, and of a few that looked at long-term warming. This led me
to want to probe more deeply and organize that material better, so that was
what we did. It was actually a remarkably easy thing to do once we decided
upon our approach, and we didn't encounter any significant hurdles.
Where do you see your research leading in the
future?
I find climate change endlessly fascinating and expect to continue to work
on it for several years.
Do you foresee any social or political
implications for your research?
Climate change is an issue that certainly has social and political
implications in terms of our collective future choices, which ought to be
informed by the best possible scientific understanding.
Susan Solomon, Ph.D.
Senior Scientist
National Ocean & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
Earth Systems Research Lab
Division of Chemical Science
Boulder, CO, USA Web |
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